By Paths Unknown
by Elerena
Summary: Set in Mage: The Awakening. In which two fledgling mages struggle to make sense of the new world thrust upon them, while the other theurges wonder at their method of Awakening.


10 years ago…

"G'night, Andrea", David whispered, giving his girlfriend a kiss on the ear as they settled down to sleep. "I love you... see you in the morning."

"Mmmm... " Andrea smiled. "Love you too, honey. Tomorrow... Let's tell our families tomorrow, okay?"

"Sounds like a plan to me, babe." David smiled, sliding a hand across Andrea's smooth stomach. "They're going to be ecstatic, I just know it."

Andrea wriggled her back up against his in the bed. "I hope so... your parents always just made me sort of nervous. I can't help but think they don't like me all that much."

"Oh, they give everyone that feeling, love... besides, we're telling them what we're up to, not asking their permission. If they don't like it... well, that's what we have each other for." He smiled to her and rested his chin on her shoulder.

Andrea smiled warmly to herself, linking her ankles around David's. "Thanks, hon. You always know just what to say..." she exhaled, slowly slipping off to sleep.

David stroked her arm, starting to fall off to sleep himself. "Only because I love you more'n you'll ever know..." he smiled, drifting off to sleep with the soothing sound of her breathing.

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David came to with a start. Something wasn't right; he could feel it deep inside himself. Something was very, very wrong with the world around him. He couldn't tell what it was, but he needed to fix it. HAD to fix it. _I don't understand_, he thought. _Where am I_?

Shaking his eyes open, he looked around. His bed, his room, his clothing... all of it was gone. He found himself lying on a pile of moss. Searching his body, he saw that he had put on muscle and lost fat; he seemed to glow from within with vitality. _What the hell is this?!?_, he thought frantically. _Okay... okay, David, calm down. Take stock of your surroundings_.

His bedroom was gone. Sitting there on his pile of moss and leaves, he was surrounded by a verdant forest, eerily quiet. Trees rose thousands of feet above him, while the earth at his feet seemed to give visible life to the plants in it, making them grow almost before his eyes. The smell of thick loam and woody fruits filled his nostrils as he slowly turned around, trying to get his bearings. Straining his ears, he heard a whisper at the very edge of his hearing... "It comes... it comes, it comes to claim us...'

David felt a sudden presence behind him. Whirling, he dropped to all fours, pausing only briefly to wonder at why the motion felt natural. Padding towards him from a thicket of smaller trees was a snowy wolf, a stark contrast against the dark colors of the rest of the forest. Seeing him, the wolf froze in its tracks, facing towards David. David attempted to shout at the wolf, to scare it off, but all that came out of his through was a canine growl. He raised his hand to his mouth in surprise, to find that he no longer had a hand, but a paw instead... nor a face, but rather a snout.

Experimentally, he tried walking forward, finding motion as a wolf as natural as breathing. He padded towards the snowy wolf, sniffing at it the whole way. He wasn't certain why, but the wolf smelled... familiar, comforting, soothing. He nuzzled up against the wolf, licking its cheek as it did the same to him.

A sharp report in the woods behind them caused both their heads to snap around. The voices that David had heard before returned, louder this time; "It comes, it comes, it comes to claim all..."

A vast, unseen presence suddenly loomed out of the woods above the pair of wolves, causing the white wolf to hunker down against the loam. David snarled and bared his teeth skyward, angry at the presence. As much as the snowy wolf reminded him of comfort, this presence above was definitively -wrong-. It reeked of wrongness, evil seeping down and permeating the atmosphere itself around them with discomfort, anger, and hate. The voices screamed out in agony... except for one, right next to David's ear. "Follow... you must follow... you must save..." With that, it began to emit a low tone, a calming frequency to the agitated wolves. The sound faded off into the woods, away from the direction the wrongful presence had come. Obeying their internal drive, the two wolves bound after it in pursuit.

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Andrea awoke gently, cradled in a bed of lilies above a pond. Rising slowly, she glanced around at her strange surroundings. The pond itself was luminescent, glowing a faint green beneath her. As she sat up on the lilies, they sank down around her, depositing her into the lake, whose water did not wet her. Looking down at her foot, she saw it clearly submersed in the lake, but could feel no water against her leg. Moving to the shore, she felt fabric move across her skin. Looking to herself, she saw that she was now wearing a loose woven silk dress, waving loosely around the middle of her calves, the round of her shoulders and the top of her breasts.

Wonderingly, she walked lightly over the silken grass of the glen next to the lake. Bending over from the waist to sniff and a rainbow-colored flower growing in a spiral from the ground, the blades of grass around it at innumerable different heights. She looked over at a slender tree, tracing her eyes up the trunk, which grew thicker and older looking the higher it rose, then tapering down to a dead piece of wood at the top. Walking across the glen to stare at the bizarre tree, she stopped as she noticed an oddity on the ground. Her bare feet... she felt as if she was standing on dry, cracked earth, but looking down, she saw springy, vibrant grass. Spinning around, she saw herself lying on the lilies in the lake, peacefully asleep. After blinking to clear her eyes, the sight disappeared.

From the copse of odd trees, a tinkling alto laugh echoed into her ears. Curious, she glided her way over to the trees, searching for the source of the laugh. As she entered the grove, the laugh came again, further into the lightly wooded copse. Following the laugh, she caught saw reflections and refractions of images in the crystal bark of the trees. Fascinated, she walked up to one of the trees with crystal wood, raising a hand up to touch the surface of the tree. Her image rose to meet her from within the tree... except the image inside the tree was young, then old, then skeletal, than embryonic... a different age from every different angle Andrea could gaze at it from. Sliding her hand down the surface of the tree, she felt patches of smooth wood, rough bark, and brittle deadwood, but could see no difference between the surfaces.

The alto laugh came through the trees again, drawing Andrea further into the sparsely wooded forest. She couldn't quite place it, but she was certain she had heard the voice before somewhere... that it belonged to someone she knew very well. It was a source of familiarity in this strange and bizarre land, seducing her with thoughts of finding her bearings again.

Looking up above the twisted treetops, none of which seemed to maintain a consistent height or age, she saw a massive silver tower on the horizon, reaching miles into the air above the trees. The flowing silver surface of the tower was marred be countless scratch-like lines, but Andrea couldn't make out what caused them from her distance. Entranced, she started hiking towards the tower.

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David and the snow wolf tore through the forest at top speed, the malevolent presence always sensed near behind them, the comforting one ever pulling away ahead. Suddenly, the tree line around them broke away as they entered a massive clearing at the entrance to a gargantuan cave, littered with decades-dry bones from animals of every family of beasts the world had known... and some that it hadn't, from the looks of the skeletons. David skidded to a halt, sensing a massive power from inside the cave, while the powder snow wolf raced into the seeming safety of the yawning chamber. A black mist flowed out from the trees they had just fled, and a sound not unlike the chattering of a million cicadas filled the air as it coalesced into an almost solid form, heading at high speed for the cave. Fearing for the white wolf, David sprinted towards the cavern as fast as his canine form would allow, passing up the malevolent entity just as they both passed under the lip of the entrance. The black form narrowed part of itself to a needle sharp point, elongating into almost a spear, and flew straight towards the female that had sought refuge in the spacious hideaway. Howling his rage, David flung himself in the path of the bolt, his ululation transforming itself into a yelp of pain and a soft whimper as the bolt impacted with his belly. The blackness felt slicker than oil, yet at the same time stuck to his skin more strongly than anything David had ever known. The omnipresent buzzing that had filled the air ever since the being's appearance took on a sudden shrieking quality, screaming out pain as the black liquid on David's once again human form boiled heatlesslly away into the air. Holding in his intestines from the jagged wound in his abdomen, David slumped down to the ground. _At least... she's safe..._, he thought, nearly unconscious. _At least she'll live. It all will_.

Nudging David's neck with her nuzzle, the female wolf licked him on the cheek, gratitude radiating from her posture. Padding around to his front side, she dabbed one paw in the pool of blood that had formed around him, and almost delicately began drawing a design on the cave floor next to them. Vision already fading, David struggled to make out the shapes; with effort, he discerned that the wolf was writing out his name on the floor. With the completion of the wolf's bloody inscription of "David Milonden", the life fluid began to glow slightly, growing in intensity with every passing minute. Other patches of the cave began to glow as well, revealing thousands - millions - of other names written into the substance of the cave. The light washed over David, filling him with warmth and vitality. Looking down, he saw that the rent in his stomach was healed- cleanly, completely, and absolutely. There was no scar, no mark at all... and no pain. He was fully functional once again.

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Andrea came to a rest at the base of the tower. Her hike had been strange; it had seemed there were always creatures just outside of her vision, teasing her, but as soon as she turned her eyes, the feeling vanished, only to return as soon as she returned to her journey. Motes of light had preformed strange dances over trees the size of flowers, and around flowers the size of trees. She had crossed tiny meadows in what felt like hours, and traversed the entire length of rivers in what she would have sworn was mere minutes. More confused than she had ever been in her life, she implored the laugh she had been following for help. "What is this? Why am I here? Who are you?" she cried it.

Chuckling, the faraway voice replied from next to her ear. "It is everywhere and nowhere, as you are here forever and never... as I am everyone and no-one at all."

"Grgggh... that is the LEAST useful, MOST aggravating answer I've ever received! I swear, I'll see you vanish forever!"

As soon as her statement finished, every iota of ambient noise disappeared from the area. The voice, now accompanied by a shining mote of light in front of her, spoke again, with resignation in its voice. "Then so you shall. Now is the time for things to be as they are." A pair of doors Andrea hadn't noticed before (rather strangely, as they were three times her height and at least fifteen the width) opened wide in front of them, revealing a marbled hall leading to a massive throne of willow. Seated on the throne was a huge man wearing a bone helmet made from a ram's skull. Feeling herself pulled forward by a powerful sense of destiny, Andrea stepped forward into the hall, slowly walking up to the immense man, the mote trailing a few feet behind her.

The man spoke to her, his voice bellowing forward. "Your presence here is not of our natural order. It has brought with it anchorage that cannot be afford. The verdict is simple: You must either leave, or become part of us!"

"But I don't even know what's going on here!" she protested. "I just woke up here, confused... I have no idea what's going on, or even where I am. I don't understand anything that's happening..."

"It matters not," the giant intoned. "We lack the power to cast you out, so we are given only the one option. Your companion, the satarin- he will be the fuel to forge your link to our realm."

"What?!? But he's done nothing! He hasn't harmed anyone- in fact, he was the one that led me here! You can't just -kill- him!"

"The choice is not ours, little one. You swore that you would see him vanish forever. The oath must be fulfilled."

"But- that wasn't an oath! I was just venting!"

"Child, you swore. It must be upheld, and nothing any of us can do can change that."

Taking the form of a luminescent man, the mote of light stepped forward and stroked her arm gently. "He's right... it's time for things to be as they are. With this, you'll return, only complete. Let this be done. Let things be as they are."

A tear slowly rolled its way down Andrea's cheek. "I- I'm sorry. For causing this."

The mote's chuckle returned. "You didn't cause this... no more than you cause the stars to turn. Now watch."

With that, the luminescent body dissolved into a cloud of motes, sinking down to cover one of the marble slabs of the tower's floor. Slowly, the most converged to form fanciful, curlicued writing in the form of her name. At last, the motes sank slightly more, than dissipated, leaving "Andrea Catti" engraved in the flagstone. Tearful, she looked up at the giant on the throne.

"It is done, little one. You now have the power to return yourself to whence you came."


End file.
